Asia’s Millennials, Robots and the Future

Are they ready?
“Millennials are younger, more familiar with technology, still on their search of finding what their dream job is — I think they’re much more willing to roll with the punches of some of their jobs becoming automated.”        —The Young Professional’s Guide to the Working World 

Robots to settle first in Asia
A huge, potent chunk of humanity is on the rise in Asia and it has an important rendezvous with the future, including getting real chummy with the largest concentration of robots on Earth.

Thematic research analyst Fabiano Vallesi, at Julius Baer, tallies their numbers at 390 million in China alone, with an additional 400 million across the Bay of Bengal in India; all of them born between 1981 and 1996. That’s more than the entire population of Western Europe. Toss in their brethren in East and Southeast Asia, and the world’s continents bow in their direction.

Wealthier and better educated than their parents, certainly better employed and living in greater comfort, tens of millions fill the ranks of the middle class, with tens of millions more just beneath in the urban mass who are eagerly trying to elbow their way up.

Not the tight-fisted saver reputation (especially in China) that their parents made legendary (many saving 40 percent of incomes: in China “deposits currently stand at $21 trillion”). Millennials spend, and spend big!  And there spending is made up of equal parts wisdom and gusto.

On Singles’ Day 2017, for example, 130 million of China’s 600 million Internet users were online waiting for the opening bell; all together they ordered 800 million packages of stuff for delivery; 68 percent of which were made via cellphone. All in a single day! Alibaba claimed that it raked in an astounding $25.3 billion.

Vallesi says of these up-and-comers that they “will make up over one quarter of global consumption growth in the next 15 years.”

Okay, they have plenty of discretionary funds to spend, so what then are these millennials buying? Vallesi boils their spending patterns to six key areas:

• Digital commerce
• Digital finance
• Entertainment
• Premium consumer goods
• Sportswear and fitness
• Travel

A quick look at that list shows that they have another commodity aplenty: time. Entertainment, sportswear and fitness say a lot about time spent in lifestyle, while, in the case of China, its tourists spent $215 billion last year out of country.

Supplying 790 million Asian millennials with the above six spending hotspots will take a lot of automation to pull off; without robots, three of the six will be impossible deliverables: digital commerce, premium consumer goods, and sportswear. The solution is then a simple one: the consumers are willing to spend, the money is there, so there will be robots to fully automate goods to buyers. End of story.

And it will take all of Asia, East and Southeast, to satisfy this gargantuan appetite, which is precisely the reason why investment money is flooding into the continent, especially fintech.

Fortune reports: “Investors poured a record $4.5 billion into financial start-ups in Asia [especially China and India] last year, four times as much as the previous year, data shows, putting the region at the center of the global tech revolution poised to shake up the financial services industry.

“Total investments into peer-to-peer lenders, payment services companies and Internet insurers globally rose to $19.1 billion, 60 percent more than in 2014, data from KPMG and CB Insights showed.”

By 2020, with millennials the majority in the workforce, it will be millennials who will be the first to confront large-scale robot displacement of jobs.